


Printemps

by Ethike_arete



Series: Les Saisons [1]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, French History RPF, French Revolution RPF
Genre: M/M, Rosati, attempted adherence to history
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-24 15:22:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15633414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ethike_arete/pseuds/Ethike_arete
Summary: “I am here in advance of the Convention, as well you know.  I arrived today.”“Most men would delay attendance in favour of rest.”“I am not most men.  If most would find it pleasant to be on the periphery of great events, I have only felt myself in exile.”In which Saint-Just arrives in Paris and quite unintentionally upsets the general order of Robespierre's private life.





	Printemps

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Printemps](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16363874) by [yrko69](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yrko69/pseuds/yrko69)



_**Paris, 1792** _

 

The Revolution is an extension of the will of the people, an organ of their justice, lively and irrepressible as a flock of birds in flight: now harried by a hawk on the wing, now indulging the liberating joy of wind in their feathers.  If there have been times when that flight took the flock away from the Jacobins, so to did they increasingly return there, like birds newly tamed, to roost.  For what free creature would fly to keepers who clipped their wings too hard or broke their delicate necks to ready them for the pot?  

The Jacobin Club itself, however, where Maximilien Robespierre now sat, was an extension of his very soul that he felt like a phantom limb.  He knew its moods as a farmer knows the language of the clouds and the moon, or a sailor the pull of the tides and the tumultuous rage of the sea.  Knowing the club so well, it took little for him to notice subtleties that even Couthon- alert and steady friend though he was- would not.  Brissot once called Maxime a spider.  Were it not an insult, Maxime might have acknowledged its truth: as the orb weaver sits in its web, each foot attuned to the slightest pull of silk, so too Maxime knew when there was a shift amongst the members of the club.  The hum of quiet dispute, the gathering of some new faction and the emotions of his audience were not beyond him.  So it was that in the death throes of Summer, 1792, that Maxime felt Clotho spinning towards some new destiny, tangling some hitherto loose thread with his own.  Felt it like a change of light to his aching, bloodshot eyes or a fall from some hitherto unseen parapet.

With his glasses still perched atop his wig, people at the club tended to blur into one another like smeared paint on David’s palette.  It was only when shape and colour parted that Maxime registered the vague perception of an approaching figure.  Given his abysmal sight, Maxime sensed more than saw the shifting focus of members and spectators alike.  Their attentiveness possessed the same wary quality as a grazing herd awaiting the hunter’s step.  How Maxime wished he had their eyes now, to view with multi-faceted gaze this guest that so captured a public imagination increasingly inured to spectacle.

 _What might this signify?_ he wondered.  Though he would rather engage Couthon in discussion about Rolland’s latest scribblings in _Le Thermomètre du Jour_ , he settled his glasses before his stinging eyes instead.  Within moments, the light resolved from bonfire to candle flame: a youthful face shaped with such marvelous symmetry that Hephaestus himself might have cut those marble cheeks with no purpose but the pleasure of cupping them in his rough hands.  The mouth was full, curved as a Scythian bow.  Even at so respectable a distance, Maxime could not make much of the colour of the man's eyes.  He only knew that they were dark as the night ocean is dark, and that they fixed upon his own face with studious intensity.  He could not read the expression, but something in it suggested they had known one another since the dawn of time itself.  Here, Maxime became confused, for he was painfully aware that this man was one who, once met, rarely strayed from the mind.

Ever at his elbow, David stirred and leaned forward.  When Maxime looked at his friend, he understood immediately, and with no small sympathy, the nature of the painter’s focus.  Here, suggested every aspect of his face, was a muse worth a thousand paintings.  Maxime might have laughed: where others would rise to defend him against the possibility of an assassin, the painter was busy making this youth into another Hector for his rumpled sheets.

“Maxime,” David said, voice hooking up into a baited question.  “Do you know…?”

“Citizen Robespierre,” said the youth, low and certain as a master calling an errant student’s attention back to his Latin.

“Do we know one another, Citizen?” Maxime asked, rising to his feet and instantly feeling every inch of the gap between their heights.  “Have we met?”  _I would have recalled you…_

The youth briefly closed his great, dark eyes.  He stood as though upon the point of declamation: head high, all the graceful lines of his body pulled taut.  Not pride, though it could easily be mistaken for such, but certainty.  When he spoke he did not trouble himself, as some might, to lower his voice.

“You whom I know as I know God, by your miracles,” he said, as though reciting a line of poetry oft repeated.  He lowered his eyes to Maxime’s and tipped his head down: not a bow, but a deep nod of his charming head that sent curls tumbling ‘round his face.  “Your humble, most obedient servant.”

“Saint-Just!”

Maxime’s voice burst almost painfully from his throat like a bird bursting from cover.  His hands flew up as though to chase the name only to be caught ‘round the wrists in the loose shackles of Saint-Just’s hands.  He might have rebuked such familiarity from others- _Desist, Citizen!_ \- and yet the only surprise the moment held was how he acceded to it.  He indulged Saint-Just’s delighted, near-silent laugh, the happiness stamped upon his face.  Indulged, too, the unfamiliar sensation of being allowed to give in to such simple, unaffected fondness.  _Relent,_ the young man’s grip seemed to say, _let us share both joy and burden now I have arrived._

“You have come to Paris at last Citizen Saint-Just,” he managed to say, in spite of the humiliating tic that decided to assert its presence now.  "I'm pleased to welcome you."

Back on thicker ice, now, rather than the perilously thin surface he had skated upon.  Even so, the world seemed to list when Saint-Just’s hands released him with a final press that made Maxime’s wrist groan and protest such treatment.

“I am here in advance of the Convention, as well you know.  I arrived today.”

“Most men would delay attendance in favour of rest.”

“I am not most men.  If most would find it pleasant to be on the periphery of great events, I have only felt myself in exile.”

That sentiment alone, familiar to Maxime from their intermittent correspondence, brought David and Couthon forward at last.  They were full of remarks and questions that Maxime only half heard, and which Saint-Just answered with such perfect politesse that both these more worldly men seemed impressed.  In only moments they had it out of him in his simple, studiously laconic sentences that he had served in the National Guard, how many siblings he had, where he would stay while in Paris.  In short, they had made a study of the man and thoroughly accepted him.  So much so that David had already hooked an arm around Saint-Just’s narrow waist, intent on making the rounds with him as if strolling with some blushing sweetheart.

It was too much: a goal worked towards, a wish granted, and yet somehow too momentous to bear without being momentous at all.  As soon as Maxime could do so without appearing rude or dismissive, he slipped his glasses back atop his wig.  The world softened and blurred around him until each figure was no more than a brush of colour and light.  Even then, Saint-Just's light burned brighter than any other.  Over his shoulder, the deputy's voice remained audible, cutting through the din as though Maxime’s ears had been made to receive only his words.

“You will find me worthy, Citizens.  You will see it, if you allow: I will make history.”

Hours later, long after most members had returned home to warm beds and the tender embraces of their loved ones, Maxime walked home alone.  The night was sharp with frost, the streets virtually empty as he entered the Duplay’s courtyard.  No light but his own and that of the moon lit the steps to his room, but thoughtful Éléonore had allowed the candles to burn for him, and he marked the lateness of the hour by the profusion of wax upon their sides.  He burnt his hands over their tiny flames and thought of the breathless story David had repeated to him before leaving: how Saint-Just, in his Revolutionary fervor, had once thrust a hand into the fire of a burning, royalist pamphlet.

With as little thought as he might give to breathing, Maxime unlatched a small chest on his desk.

There were many, many letters he had long ago discarded.  Even Camille’s had not all survived the changes wrought by passage of time and the growing weight of political experience.  And yet this one remained: a cheap, honest rectangle of coarse paper covered in staccato points of rushed writing, as though the hand could not keep up with the mind driving it.

Those words: _Y_ _ou whom I know as I know God._

There was a voice to them now, effortlessly recalled and replayed in the silence of Maxime's chamber.

*

In the nights and weeks that followed, Saint-Just’s presence became a constant at the Jacobin Club.  Sometimes he arrived later, at others earlier.  He always stayed for Maxime’s speeches, sitting at the very front of the gathering the moment Maxime mounted the rostrum, so that the candle flame of his face burned brightest in Maxime’s dim gaze.  Burned so bright, at times, that Maxime shunned his green-tinted glasses and instead spoke blind, relying upon memory and embroidering his points with anecdotes and allusions that he might otherwise have struck down with judicious contempt.  For his part, Saint-Just remained so polite as to seem aloof, quiet admidst the company of so many venerable revolutionaries.  Unlike other men, Saint-Just did not lavish approval on the more famous amongst them.  If anything, he rationed still less of his esteem to Maxime, feeding it to him in the smallest of droplets like training a hummingbird to take sugar water.  Maxime found himself chasing Saint-Just's fleeting words of praise, each of which encouraged the flights of his imagination and reasoning to ever greater heights.

Like Icarus, he flew and flew and flew.

Maxime thought, at times, that if Saint-Just spoke but one word of contempt it would fall upon his wings like the angry sun and melt the wax binding pinion to pinion.

The fall, he knew, would be enough to pierce his heart with pointed rib and broken bone.

*

“You know, I think one of our newly elected deputies has drawn your eye, Maxime,” Camille chirped.

It was a chill day after a frosted morn’, and one of the rare days of rest apportioned (or stolen) by various members of the Convention.  Though their friendship had once passed in cycles of intensity and devotion, only now settling into a bucolic middle age that had caught both men by no small degree of surprise, there remained times when it felt to Maxime that they remained in constant orbit around one another.  They had been many things to each other throughout the years, sweet memories mixing with the bitter like sugar in black coffee.  Even so, and though they strolled arm in arm now through the Palais Royale like students on holiday, though Camille pulled him to his side at every confidence and sharp-witted jest, it served only to widen the growing distance between their souls.  If most would describe Camille’s undue warmth, his ink-stained hands and nervous mouth as earthly, then Maxime found himself playing the role of the cold, inconstant moon at its apogee.        

“There are many good citizens amongst the deputies,” Maxime said.  “The people have found their voice.  How could it be otherwise?”

“B-b-but we are speaking solely of the C-convention.”

“Of course.  It bodes well for the trial.”

Echoes of Sparta in that sentence.  Saint-Just spilling from his lips.

“Many, perhaps, b-but I meant just one: Saint-Just, is it not?  I recall the s-silly token of his clumsy letters.”

Maxime sniffed.  “I don’t recall them being silly.”

“Of course not.  Did he not c-c-call you God?  What would that make him, I wonder, other than a very devout priest?  On his knees at the altar, perhaps?”

“That’s indelicate, Camille,” Maxime snapped, a hundred of Camille's other petty jests coming to mind.  “What is it you’re insinuating?”

“Nothing awful.  Nor illegal, now.  But that p-pretty rural b-b-bumpkin,” Camille laughed, as he often did, to reset his stutter.  “How fortunate that your lady admirers have no eye for fraternal love such as the Greeks demonstrated.  I fear they would want his fine head for the guillotine, though he clearly treasures it even more than high cravats and silk stockings.”

  
No thought, only reaction: the twitch of muscle in Maxime’s arm as he sought to pull away, hastily checked by Camille’s grip.  He could not bring himself to look up at Camille’s handsome face, the dark eyes that lacked all traces of Saint-Just’s warmth and hopeful sincerity.  In the early days of Saint-Just’s arrival in Paris, Maxime had sought to compare the men, to convince himself that his sudden, regrettable fascination was only the result of their similarities: the eternally boyish cast of their faces, the curls, the dark depths of their eyes.  He corrected himself now, sharply.  He could not meet Camille’s gaze, deadened by cynical posturing.  When Maxime turned his attention, instead, to the hands he had once so loved, he could only see the black blotches upon them as the manifestation of some insidious disease.  Corruption spreading from within.  A poison that marked what he was becoming, and which one day must consume poor Lucile, unless the sweetness of her more homely virtue could arrest its march.

“You’re indecent,” he declared.

“There was a time, Maxime, when indecency was an act we committed regularly.  The people may name you 'Incorruptible', but I know you too intimately for all that."  He sighed, as if trying to educate a particularly dull pupil.  "Desire is like the first thaw of the ice, it may be delayed by chill nights, but eventually we all yield and break before our natures.  Do not forget: I was there for your first fall.  It was I who pushed and you who stumbled, but I recall no complaints.”

“Good God, Camille, did Danton teach you to speak thus?  I knew you when your tongue was made only for Latin.”

“You are not a working man, Maxime.   If Danton has taught me anything, it is that you must learn to speak the people's language in order to lead them.  Besides, my tongue was often made for other things as well.”

“I believe in the goodness of others, or try to.  Not in their depravity.”

“Well, Maxime, I fear you have replaced me,” Camille teased, bending down as though to kiss his mouth right there, in public.  "Have joy of your young Spartan."

This time, he allowed it when Maxime pulled away, and only chased him with mocking laughter.

*

“I am aware, of course, that you are making your maiden speech on Tuesday.”

After his visit with Camille, it had taken Maxime days longer to decide on even this small course of action: arresting Saint-Just’s evening departure from the Convention.  Though he knew the younger man had heard his voice a thousand times or more, Maxime disliked how it was amplified by the walls of this corridor. Though proud enough of his words, he never heard his own voice without a certain amount of startled disappointment.  Each poor string in his throat produced sound, but it grated upon the ears like a badly played violin.  Maxime cleared his throat as though tuning the unfortunate instrument.

“I could,” he said, “if you wish, provide some meagre share of advice to guide you.”

He gestured with what he hoped was passable confidence at the sheaf of papers in Saint-Just’s hand, though he had no earthly idea of their content.  This attempt at asserting some mentorship felt less like a mantle and more like an ill-fitting suit of clothes in which he had decided to smother himself.  Saint-Just looked at him with eyes like Solomon, as though by gaze alone he could cut through all deception.

  
“I thank you for your consideration, Citizen Robespierre,” he finally said.  “I need no assistance.”

Was Maxime mistaken, or did Saint-Just’s nod seem chill in its politeness?  Did he turn more quickly on his heel?

“Have I perhaps caused offence, Citizen?” Maxime called after his departing form.  “If so, let me repair it.”

Saint-Just paused and turned back.  His expression, caught in momentary disarray, showed such shock, such colour high on the cheekbones, that a casual observer might think him soundly slapped.  Then he marshaled his vaunted stoicism with all expected alacrity as he returned to face Maxime.  If Camille were watching, Maxime reflected, then he was surely laughing at the older man’s visibly flustered response to Saint-Just’s proximity.  At how the twitch of his eye and lip refused to cease their frantic beat.

“Do you think me so vain, Citizen?  So prone to insult?  Who wasted your nights pouring calumny in your ear?”  Saint-Just tilted his head like a physician observing some surprising sign of illness in his patient.  “Let me draw that venom with my assurance: nothing could be further from my mind.

Marat, passing by, stopped at Maxime’s side only to bray a laugh.  “Oh God, now we must contend with you both.  Save us from lawyers and orators.”  He clapped Maxime on the back, sending the overpowering scent of vinegar washing over them all.  “You’re an idiot, Citizen.  The student must prove himself to the master sometimes, right, young man?”

Saint-Just inclined his head to Marat, though his eyes remained steady on Maxime.

“It is with my own teeth that I will bite the wound Louis Capet has made upon the nation’s body,” Saint-Just finally said.  “And with my own mouth that I will suck poison from it, even should it burn my tongue.  Even should I die.”

Maxime could do nothing but accept such an answer, given with such elaborate certainty.  Marat clicked his tongue approvingly.  As soon as Saint-Just had left them, the doctor looped one bony arm around Maxime and pulled him close.  

“Shit,” he said.  “That one could bury a man with words alone.  Better that he’s for us, eh?”

*

“Perhaps one day, men as far removed from our prejudices as we are from those of the Vandals will be astonished by the barbarity of an age in which the judging of a tyrant was thought to be something sacred…”

It was rare, in the febrile air of the Convention, to have silence.  Indeed, in spite of the oaths and mutterings of the royalists and their lackeys, it was as quiet as the Convention ever got  Each deputy listened, as did the people in the gallery.  They attended upon each and every word as Saint-Just’s sonorous voice effortlessly filled the room.

“One day men will be astonished by the fact that humanity in the eighteenth century was less advanced than in the time of Caesar…”

The Jacobin deputies stirred as though a ferocious gust of wind buffeted them, but responded in their own fashion: Marat with bitten curses, David with admiring sighs, Camille with bitter scowls.  Maxime strained forward in his seat and clung to its edge as if all his life depended upon it: a shipwrecked man lost on time’s tide, heedful only of that distant shore of possibility where Saint-Just already stood.  Once he had thought those lips like a bow, and now Maxime knew it to be true: lips curved like supple wood, tongue the string from which the arrow of each word shot forth.  And he, Maximilien Robespierre, l’Incorruptible, struck deep.  So wounded by Saint-Just’s genius that he could only lean into every new wound as the blood drained from his knuckles with the force of his grip.

“We seek liberty, and we are becoming each other's slaves! We seek nature, and live armed, like wild savages. We desire a Republic, independence, and unity, but we are divided and treat a tyrant with gentleness…”

Still he spoke, standing at the rostrum, a masculine Galatea.  Though Maxime’s gentle file had not so much as smoothed an errant curl, Saint-Just seemed shaped from his every dream, from his will, from longing and history.  A word and a world made flesh.  Maxime would cross the Convention, would throw his arms around his waist and declare the sincerity of their friendship before the whole uncomprehending world.  Let Rousseau contend that woman was made complimentary to man, for in this area their philosophies parted and he would gladly declare the philosopher a fool.  Their shared sex aside, Maxime knew with all the force of nature that Saint-Just had been made for him.

“Citizens, the tribunal which must judge Louis is not a judiciary tribunal…it is a council…it is the People…it is you.

The speech ended too soon, like a broken spell, and for a bare moment a quiet held like the calm preceding the most violent of storms.  This silence broke apart to the thunder of applause and stamped feet, cheers and yells like the howl of a gale, a roar like the drum of rain on the rooftops.  The unleashed noise bore Maxime to his feet, applauding, yelling as well, though he hardly knew what.  He spoke no earthly language in that moment, but instead shaped sound from spirit alone.  Across the thick air of the Convention, Saint-Just’s eyes met his.  A smile appeared that shone like sunlight between scudding clouds.

“Let me speak!  Let me speak!”

Some far-off part of him heard his own cries as though they originated from another man.  He felt himself move, though he waded against the great tide of bodies.  Someone- several someones- held him back as he yelled and yelled and the calls to order began.  He did not care.  He would speak though he knew not what to say, though all that might emerge from his mouth might be Saint-Just’s blessed name.

“That was a maiden speech all right,” Marat said, hours later, when they had all reunited at the Jacobin Club.  “This particular virgin spilled enough blood in the Convention to wet the Revolution’s sheets.”

Maxime frowned, revolted by the foulness of the metaphor.  Revolted by anything, really, that might despoil the sacred nature of Saint-Just’s speech.

“Stop curling your lip, Robespierre.  It was you who died screaming upon his point today.  See, brothers,” Marat said, flinging himself back in his seat as though he’d proved some complex theorem.  He gestured to Maxime's face.  “Honest truth brands the cheeks of our dear Incorruptible.”

Had Saint-Just not appeared at that moment, Maxime might have lashed out at their jests and jibes.  All the ribald humour, an ugly reminder of his school days, ceased abruptly at the young deputy’s arrival.  There were only congratulations and praise to be offered in tribute to his speech, the popular demand- which Maxime, entirely spent, now meekly encouraged- that it be read again.  Saint-Just assented politely.  Then it was simply the two of them, facing one another, the expected order of their friendship now overturned as every other rule had been in this new world.

“I would embrace you, Citizen,” Saint-Just finally said.  “Though only if you approve of my tawdry words today.  I could have done better.”

“No,” Maxime said.  Meaning ‘no, you could not have done better’, but Maxime’s words dried at their fount just as they seemed most likely to spill.  Only Saint-Just’s chaste kiss on his pocked cheeks provided a balm to the sting of humiliation he felt at coming so undone in his speech. “My friend,” Maxime repeated, again and again, clutching at his arms and returning kiss for kiss.  “My very dear friend.”

Saying the rosary of the Revolution: _my friend, my friend, my very dear friend.  There is love and only love._

*

“Saint-Just is nothing but a pornographer.  An idle cad.  A thief.  A liar.”

“And a Roman in all the ways you aren’t, dear heart," Danton said.  "Including that one.”

Maxime stood frozen in the midst of his chamber at the Duplay’s, the little chest with his friend’s first gentle letter no more than a blur in the corner of his eyes.  His gaze shifted from Camille and the offending document in his hand to Danton, lounging in Maxime's favourite chair.  The great man seemed barely contained by its embrace, and entirely disinterested in the allegations apart from as a source of general amusement.

  
“I can’t imagine why some scurrilous writings would concern you both,” Maxime said.

“They don’t at all,” Danton replied.  “Other than something I’d rather wipe my ass with.  The verse is worse than your attempts at song.”

“And you, Camille?  Am I to believe you came for the sake of our friendship?  We’ve not been much in each other’s company of late.”

“I hate him,” Camille said simply.  “I would as soon trundle him off to p-perdition as I would Louis Capet.  But seeing how the whole of France must know now of your ridiculous adulation, I thought to expose the truth to you first.”

“Ah, the journalist’s prerogative.  Truth, you say, when all you do is justify the spread of scandalous gossip.”

“It is no gossip.  Attend, Maxime,” said Camille, his voice sharpened for the kill.  “The waves p-p-pressed on with loud gasps; they rolled and suffocated and c-caressed; they died from wanting to fuck.”

Danton snorted like a boar, then waved at them in apology.  “Terrible verse, even without the stuttering,” he said.  “Though the sentiment is admirable.  Give it again to me to read, Camille, I have need of some relief and those nuns of his...”

“Is this to wound me?” Maxime interjected, almost snatching the copy from Camille’s hand.

“It is to warn you, old friend.  You are so p-precious with your reputation, so habituated to washing your hands after every shit...”

“Camille…”

“He is a b-blackguard.  He has rolled in filth no matter how ivory and rose his appearance, and it will stain your hands to even be seen with such a man.”

“You and he have much of the same beauty, while Danton and I must contend with not being from that mold...”

“Fuck you,” Danton grunted.  “I’m beautiful.”

Maxime might have laughed at the interruption once, and he suspected that Danton intended to break the unbearable tension between them all.  He would not bend now, though, nor forsake his friend.

“You have that same beauty, Camille, that commands the attention of both sexes,” Maxime said, returning to his point.  “But jealousy becomes you like a diamond necklace.  It sets off all that is ill in your complexion and reminds one that it has been mined in blood, and bought with famine.”

“Do you accuse me?”

“Yes.”

“Of what, then?”

“Of allowing base emotion to dictate your enmity.  Always you have been blown about, hither and thither you go like a weathercock, pointing in the direction of whichever bellowing gust passes your ear.  ‘Round and ‘round like a windmill.”

Like all good friends they’d fought before, rebuked one another.  In early days they had made love by the hour to make up for it, and in later ones written their apologies on damp paper.  Now they faced one another like gladiators in the Colosseum, though their shields and swords were but words.  Danton, perhaps scenting blood in the air like any good Emperor, sat up and watched more closely.

“Let’s part as friends,” he said, not unkindly.

“Let’s part, at least,” Maxime replied.  And then, stretching out his hand.  “I will read it.”

“And weep that you’ve so m-m-misplaced your trust.”

“For that flaw,” he said.  “I have already shed tears enough.”

*

They walked together, he and Saint-Just, now more than ever.  On their rare days or hours of rest Maxime might take Brount for a stroll and happen, as if by chance, upon his friend.  Otherwise they might leave together from the Duplays’, and Maxime would joke that he was hoarding Saint-Just’s company, which the people demanded far less of than their common friends tended to.  Most often, however, they walked together late at night after the closing of the Jacobin Club.  At such an hour no one, even those who citizens who surely recognised them, approached.  Instead Maxime shared the younger deputy’s company with nothing but the Seine and the copy of Organt he carried in his pocket.

Maxime had mentioned nothing of the poem.  Like many times before, when faced with what seemed an insurmountable decision, he had delayed.  If he died tomorrow then the people who came to clear his papers would find scrawled notes and tabulations where he weighed whether to mention it at all.  Yet he knew that if he did not, it would someday come out against his will.  Truth always did.  Even so, he lingered in Saint-Just’s silent presence like a bird sheltering in the lee of some great statue, still calculating the costs and benefits of whether to bring the matter to light.

“My friend,” Maxime finally said, stopping so abruptly that Saint-Just was already several steps ahead before he turned ‘round.  “Let’s take some rest here.”

Saint-Just glanced about, baffled, no doubt, at halting here where the shadows were deep.  His gaze drifted along the river and over the nearby balustrade.  When it returned to Maxime, who had not moved at all, there was nothing but tender concern in his expression.  The weight in Maxime’s pocket seemed only to increase, like guilt, at such gentleness.

“Your health, Citizen…?”

“No, it is not that.  I find I cannot go home tonight without addressing some concern with you.”

Even to his own ears the sentence sounded stiff and formal.  He broke away to perch on the nearby balustrade, his back to the partially frozen river.  The winter had been dry so far, but even without snow the cold seeped through the thin layer of Maxime's culottes and underclothes.  His bones ached.  If Saint-Just felt the same, he concealed it well, with only a long exhalation like a sigh to suggest discomfort.  The youth swung his legs over the stone and sat facing the river, close enough that Maxime felt their arms and hips press together.  He might have ended it there, or turned the subject to any one of the hundreds of more pressing matters than the question of Saint-Just’s morality, but still he forced himself to dredge the poem from his pocket.  To turn it so the cover was visible in the dim light.

Saint-Just did not recoil or give in to the petulant rage so many ascribed to him.  Instead his expression first hardened like the ice on the river and then thawed, a moment later, into a mask of tragedy.  He did not take the book, nor did he seek refuge in denial.  He submitted with a drop of his head, and Maxime was granted the most horrible vision: Saint-Just on the steps of the guillotine, his lovely hair clipped to make way for the blade, his neck bent under the weight of callous opprobrium.

“It is well dedicated,” Maxime joked, his voice sounding thinner than usual in the crisp air.  And then, “It does not…could never…lower my esteem for you.  But others will try, and you must not live- if it were even possible- under censure's yoke.”

Being oft under the impression that others desired no contact with him, it was rare for Maxime to initiate casual touch.  It was almost remarkably easy, however, to let his hand come to rest on Saint-Just’s shoulder.  To marvel, then, at his solidity and the warmth of his skin through the fabric of his coat.

“I know you are too honest a man not to forgive me,” Saint-Just said.  “It is my own esteem that is lacking.  I am ashamed.”

“I, too, was young,” Maxime said gently.  “Despite what some may have you believe.  There remains, I am sure, evidence of my indiscretions.  That accursed desire to follow the path that ancient custom still dictates for us.”  He paused.  He had not known, until now, that it was possible to feel so much a child and yet as ancient and venerable as Methuselah.  “There are such foolish, such devoted poems…so overwrought…as though I ever loved…”

If he could not manage his sentences, he assured himself, it was because time kept slipping sideways.  Now here with Saint-Just on the freezing, stinking banks of the Seine, now lying cradled like Moses by the warm reeds on the banks of the the Scarpe.  Now encased in his plain suit, feeling each of his years, now lying undone on the good, warm earth, his wig discarded on the grass like a skinned animal.

“Lucky few," Saint-Just said.  "To warrant such praise from your pen.”

Almost a decade ago, now: having snuck away from the Rosati, Balsamine leaned over him so that the sun radiated behind his golden head like a halo.  The frank regard in Saint-Just’s gaze, when Maxime finally met it now, reminded him of that moment and made him expectant.  Would Saint-Just close his hands, as Balsamine had, on Maxime’s thin waist?  Pull him close, only to hesitate when his fingertips sought the more familiar stays of a corset and found only the bony nubs of a man's spine?

 _I can’t bear it,_ he thought,  _i_ _f your hands seek to refashion the clay I am made of._

“I was no poet, I’m afraid,” Maxime murmured, breaking the moment rather than having to face it again.  “I could never capture the nature of my subject, even when they proved little to regard.”

  
“Then our writing is of a piece,” said Saint-Just, a little of his good humour bleeding back into his voice.  “We have butchered our words as the people butchered de Launay at the Bastille.”

“Indecent,” Maxime exclaimed, though he could not quite repress the laughter that welled in his throat.  Like good sickness, it eased the painful weight in his stomach.  “Camille already marks you a villain of the worst order.”

“And I mark him a false coin, minted by corruption.”

Before Maxime could linger too long with that dangerous thought, Saint-Just reached out.  Maxime watched  the man’s white, ungloved hand fall to his wrist.  They had been sitting so long in the shadows and the cold that Saint-Just’s skin had taken on all the chill of the marble he resembled.  Pity.  Maxime’s own hands were so numb that when Saint-Just’s hand brushed his he felt it as the mountain must feel the advancement of the glacier.  The slim booklet slipped from Maxime’s hand to Saint-Just’s.

“Away,” Saint-Just suddenly declared, rising to his feet and balancing so perilously on the precipice that Maxime almost grabbed for his coattails.  He drew back his arm like an archer and hurled the offending book into the midst of the Seine.  A splash and then it sank, the only evidence of its existence the concentric rings spreading out from where it had vanished.

Saint-Just looked down at him, haloed by the city light.  Maxime suddenly regretted the comparison of their beauty, for there was nothing of Balsamine in Saint-Just, or of Saint-Just in Balsamine.  Balsamine was fragile and downtrodden as an untended bulb in Spring where Saint-Just was as beautiful as a newly-bloomed rose, forbidding as its thorns.  

“Away,” Saint-Just reiterated.  “Away with all that is unworthy of our natures.”

_Yes._

Shouting, now, his voice echoing off stone and over the water.  “Away with all that is unworthy of the nation!”

_Yes._

“Away with false idols and privileges!”

_Yes._

“Away, even, with love!”

Maxime’s breath caught in his throat, a frozen bauble he would choke upon.  He could not but look askance at his young friend, waiting as he had in the Convention, upon the sharp fall of his hand.

“Away with love,” Saint-Just repeated, soft now, conciliatory.  “Unless it can be beaten into a blade and used for the good of the people.”

*

Scant days had passed between Saint-Just drowning his book and Camille’s arrival at the Duplay’s.  He came alone this time, bearing wine that only he drank (though Maxime, for old time’s sake, pretended to and acquitted himself fairly well).  Camille was the old Camille, a Camille before the Revolution, eloquent and lacking in either artifice or spite, generous with praise.  Confident, Maxime realised, of a victory over his rival.  It was, he thought, a tragedy worth poetry, but he would not be the man to write it.

“Are you happy with this?” Camille asked, well past midnight.  He might have meant absolutely anything by the question.  Perhaps it was one he didn’t dare voice to his other confidant.

“I am content with all that I have,” Maxime said.  “I can ask for nothing now, but peace for the nation.  Barring peace,  I am, I suppose, as content as one can possibly be in such violent times.  With such dear friends to surround me.  My little family, even you, running about like an errant brother.”

“Maxime…” Camille began to say, and froze.

Maxime did not need to look around.  He knew from the familiar rhythm of each step what he would see: Saint-Just on the outer staircase, fresh from the club.  Maxime got to his feet, though it would have been abrupt and rude to greet the other deputy just yet.  Instead he offered Camille a gentle nod and a smile.  It was all he had to give, after all.   

“Goodnight, Camille,” he said.  “Please see yourself out.”

It was, in the end, surprisingly easy.  In the endless, labyrinthine catalogue of Maxime's mind was the register of their time together.  Between the pages lay memories unwritten but oft brushed over, fondly.  Here was Camille wide-eyed with terror and anger, sleeve torn in the fray.  Here was Camille perfumed with ink and raving about Lafayette.  Here was their boyhood, the hot press of his hips against Maxime’s, stuttering faster even than his precious words in the close confines of a commode reeking of bodily functions and the soup of youthful sweat.  It was not a book to be cast aside, but one to be placed on a lower shelf.

Maxime opened the door to let Antoine in.  Here was a thinner volume than Camille’s: Antoine’s letter on Maxime’s desk, clasped between his shaking hands at the time when he most needed kind words; Antoine in the Convention, his voice filling every gap, his head high, sunlight striking his auburn hair.  Here was Antoine, now, mercurial drops of melting snow on his broad shoulders and uncovered hair, hothouse roses in his hands.

“Come in, Citizen,” Maxime said, making room for him in the chamber as he made room in his mind.  

Saint-Just filled the space, effortless.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have tried, gentle readers, to frame this story around events as they happened (as a matter of historical record). I've generally avoided specific dates and times because some of the less momentous aspects of the French Revolution- the private lives of various deputies, for example- are almost entirely a matter of conjecture and conflicting sources. I've drawn mostly on Peter McPhee's writing on the Revolution and Robespierre, though the mention of the Rosati in this and later parts of the series derives somewhat from Scurr's gossipy 'Fatal Purity'. Any errors are mine alone and a reminder that I should really return to learning French.
> 
> David's painting of Hector, mentioned in the first part of this story, is an actual painting. It is unlikely that Robespierre saw it, I would imagine, but it existed and deserves attention (though not at work).
> 
> Were there hothouse roses available in the Paris of 1792? I don't know, but I'm too fond of the image to let it go.


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